I traded forex and crypto manually for years and lost money doing it. Looking back, my strategies were rarely the main problem. I entered trades on emotion and kept no real journal of why I did anything, so I couldn't tell whether a bad week meant bad luck or a strategy that had stopped working. Like a lot of traders, I'd go on tilt, taking worse trades to win back the last loss.
Atlas is my attempt to fix that. I've rebuilt it three times to get to this version, and I'm still early. It's a trading environment that runs on my own machine and takes an idea from a written strategy to backtests, then to paper trading, and eventually to live trading. I want the system to make the decisions I used to make badly, and I want it to prove the strategy has an edge before I let it anywhere near real money.
Right now Atlas does historical research. It stores price history from an OANDA practice account as fixed evidence: 15-minute candles for my current strategy's decisions and 1-minute bid and ask candles for simulating fills. Once stored, that data can't change, so a backtest always points to the exact data it ran on. Strategies work the same way. If I change a single setting, Atlas saves a new version instead of editing the old one, which means I can't accidentally compare results against logic that no longer exists. The same version on the same data gives the same result every time, and any trade can be traced from the strategy's decision to the simulated fill. Every position is sized by one central risk rule. The first market I tested was EUR/USD. Current research runs on GBP/JPY, which forced me to handle converting profit and loss back into a USD account properly. It also forced me to stop treating EUR/USD as the only market. My AI coding agent had hard-coded it all over the place, so now each new market gets added and tested on its own.
Paper trading is close. The code exists, has been tested against a simulated broker, and as of this week can save a run and start it from the command line. It hasn't placed a real practice order yet. The first runs will use an OANDA practice account. A lot of the work went into what happens when something is unclear. An order request doesn't count as a position until the broker's own records confirm the fill, and if the outcome of an order is uncertain, Atlas stops taking new entries until it's resolved. When the market closes, even for an unscheduled pause, any setup the strategy was waiting on gets discarded, and entries stay blocked for 30 minutes after the market reopens. Stale prices or a disagreement between Atlas and the broker halt the run instead of letting it guess.
The part I care about most is that nothing trades by default. Starting Atlas doesn't authorize trading, and neither does loading credentials. Loading the practice credentials, placing the first order, activating paper trading, and restarting a run each need my approval, every time. The code that talks to the broker also refuses to connect to the live server at all. It would have been easy to let "the app is running" imply "the app can trade." I kept those as separate steps on purpose, even though it makes day-to-day use a little annoying.
I build most of my software with AI coding agents now, and Atlas is where I've learned the most about what that takes. A trading system is a demanding test. If an agent gets the risk logic mostly right, or quietly changes how something behaves between two commits, I end up with a system that isn't safe to run with real orders. Most of the discipline in Atlas exists for that reason. Fixed data, frozen strategy versions, and explicit approvals make it harder for me or an agent to ship a subtle mistake without noticing.
Atlas isn't deployed anywhere, and no real money has touched it. It isn't ready for that yet. Live trading doesn't exist, and I don't plan to build it until paper trading has run long enough to show how Atlas behaves in real market conditions. I expect real money to surface problems that paper trading can't, and I'm looking forward to finding out what they are. I'll write about the first real paper order when it happens.
Originally published at victorike.me. I write about building Atlas, the times the AI agents get it wrong, and the economic news that moves the markets I trade.
I use AI to help write these posts, the same way I use it to build Atlas. It's a tool. The stories are real, and the edits, the decisions, and the final version are mine.
Atlas is a tool. Nothing here is financial advice. I am not a registered financial or investment adviser.
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